You search the Scriptures, and you will not come

This volume has quoted these two verses in passing more than any others, and they have not yet had a day. They are the warning the whole enterprise runs on.

You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life.

The men He is speaking to were the serious ones. They knew the text. They searched it — and the Greek verb carries investigating, examining, tracking something down.

That is exactly what this volume has been recommending for seventeen weeks.

And Jesus says they were doing it, and it was not working.

The diagnosis is in the second half, and it is not about method.

These are the very Scriptures that testify about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me to have life.

The reading was accurate. The conclusion was refused.

That is a warning aimed at exactly the sort of person who would read a volume like this one to the end. Not at the careless. At the studious.

A man can spend years in a text, know its languages, follow its threads, defend its authority, and treat the whole exercise as the thing itself — because the studying is satisfying, and coming is costly.

Note also what Jesus does not say. He does not say they should search less, or that the Scriptures were the problem. He says the Scriptures testify about Him, which is the strongest possible statement of their value, and then says the searchers stopped short of the destination the text was pointing at.

Two verses later He names what was actually missing: I know you, that you do not have the love of God in you. And a few lines further: how can you believe if you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

So the obstacle was not intellectual. It was what they wanted from the room they were standing in.

And then the sentence that closes the paragraph and ought to close any week like this one: if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?

It is worth saying what this verse does not license. It has sometimes been used to disparage careful study, as though diligence itself were the danger. That reading turns the sentence inside out; Jesus never faults them for searching. What He faults is stopping at the search, and the remedy He names is not less reading but coming.

The Book was never meant to be the last stop. It is testimony. And testimony that is admired and not acted on is testimony wasted.

The verb in verse 39 can be read as an imperative — search the Scriptures — which is how the King James renders it, or as an indicative, you search the Scriptures, which is how most modern versions take it. The indicative fits the argument better, and either way the second half of the sentence carries the rebuke.

The whole discourse follows the healing at the pool on a Sabbath and the charge that He was making Himself equal with God. Jesus then lists His witnesses: John the Baptist, the works He does, the Father, and the Scriptures. This verse is the fourth item in a legal defense.

Verse 46 — if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me — is one of the strongest statements in the Gospels about the Pentateuch’s subject matter, and it is offered as an argument rather than as an assertion.

The phrase you refuse to come uses the ordinary verb for willing. The obstacle Jesus names is the will, not the understanding, which is consistent with the rest of the paragraph.

Luke 24:27 and 44 stand as the positive counterpart to this rebuke: Christ Himself walking through Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms and showing what was written about Him. The same claim, from the same speaker, delivered once as an indictment and once as a Bible study.

Look it upG2045 ἐραυνάω eraunao, to search, examine, investigate · G3140 μαρτυρέω martureo, to testify · G2309 θέλω thelo, to will, be willing · G1391 δόξα doxa, glory, reputation

Where this touchesJohn 5:31–47 · Luke 24:27, 44 (Week Five, Day One) · Acts 17:11 (Week Four, Day Seven) · 2 Timothy 3:15 (Week Ten, Day One) · James 1:22–25 (Week One, Day Seven). Psalm 19, 2 Timothy 3:16–17, Isaiah 55:10–11, Matthew 24:35, Psalm 12:6, Matthew 5:18, Romans 15:4, Hebrews 4:12, Psalm 119:89, Joshua 21:45, Isaiah 66:2, Psalm 138:2, Jeremiah 1:12, Hebrews 1:1–2, Psalm 33:6 and Deuteronomy 29:29 were the earlier single-verse days.